Does it Pay to Be Popular? Applying Gary Vaynerchuk to B2B Marketing

I love it when great minds mesh. Over on Copyblogger (a favorite blog), Sean D’Souza (a favorite blogger) has a guest post talking about Gary Vaynerchuk (a favorite social media celebrity) and his “Secret Ingredient” — and why these ingredients might not be the same ones that make your marketing recipe a success.

In short, Sean’s point is that mass popularity is limited to a few areas, generally lighter fare -gadgets, celebrity, entertainment, etc. Trying to build a B2B website or blog to numbers comparable to entertainment is an unfair comparison. By definition, the audience for a B2B service will be significantly smaller than any audience for culture or food.

So rather than fretting about hitting the kind of critical mass that popular acts attain, we in the B2B world should be focusing on what means success for us. After all, we may only need a handful of good customers in a year, rather than thousands or tens of thousands in order to stay in business. A narrow-cast to this interested audience is going to be more effective than trying to achieve mass success for something the masses aren’t interested in.

The advantage, as Sean says, is that:

Because though you get a non-popular/more niche audience, your audience is willing to pay a lot more for your products/services than they would for the popular stuff. So they’ll pay you $700 without blinking, but try selling them wine at that cost, and the vast majority of people balk.

We can certainly emulate the tools that those like Gary use — being entertaining, energized, and being aggressively innovative to get our message out — but we shouldn’t be ashamed if our success, numerically, is in a different category. What’s important is success within the context of our industry, our own efforts, our competition, and our peers.